


This Tick of Our Lifetime

by LarkAscending, PhryneFicathon



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Adventure/Romance, Established Relationship, F/M, Reunions, Travel, blink and you'll miss it smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 20:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17311709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LarkAscending/pseuds/LarkAscending, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhryneFicathon/pseuds/PhryneFicathon
Summary: Jack and Phryne are in an established relationship after their return from London. While Phryne is absent on another trip, Jack reminisces about their joint adventures and the one memory upon their return that he treasures. Sometimes the biggest gesture is a knock at the door.





	This Tick of Our Lifetime

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CollingwoodGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CollingwoodGirl/gifts).



In the doorway, Jack paused. Relieving himself of coat and hat he cast his eyes over the dark interior of his home. He found no evidence of the discarded travel that he sought. He stalled his breathing a moment and listened for the faintest hum of sound coming from within. To know Phryne as he did, was to know her blind. With her proximity came a shifting of the air, it was as much of an indicator of her presence as the scent of her French perfume had become. Tonight the atmosphere remained silent and still. Venus was not spinning on her counter axis within his home tonight.

It was always this way if she had been gone for more than a couple of weeks’ and circumstance dictated that he could not join her. Phryne’s latest endeavour had entered the second month of ‘ _no more than three, Darling’._ Though he missed her terribly he would not –could not, curtail her when distant prospects and adventure called. He’d meant it when he said that he would not ask her to change. Hers was a life too vast to be abridged, especially by something as tedious as occupational leave of absence. Nevertheless, it did not stop Jack from hoping that her wings caught an obliging wind on her return.

His waist coat removed and a whiskey retrieved, Jack sat heavily into his armchair. The soft leather cushions welcomed his weary frame as both man and upholstery let out a sigh from the exertion of it. Relaxing further, he gave mind to the stretched fabric pulling taught over his knees. He supposed he really ought to fix something to eat, his last meal being some – he looked to the clock on his mantel piece – twelve hours ago; courtesy of Collins and the pie cart. Both men were missing their better halves, Mrs Collins being Phryne’s travel companion on this latest journey. It was a philanthropic affair to bequeath resources for the building of a school for girls in India. Had Jack not already exhausted his annual leave – and more than a little of his superiors goodwill, he would have joined her.

He found that he was easily enough occupied at work; mind and body were employed in the minutiae of policing, but at home the ease at which her presence became apparent in her absence made it somewhat harder. Like mica in stone, there were little incandescent flecks of her scattered about the place, catching his eye. Not to be seen to be ‘pacing the widows walk,’ as Mac had so eloquently put it one evening, was harder to do.

He needed only to look over to his bookcase for an example. There he knew he would find numerous dog eared volumes. He smiled at the memory of the acquisition of the first creased pages to his collection. He’d found himself quite uncharacteristically alone in bed one morning, only to find Phryne sitting cross legged before his bookcase, back bent and poring over one of his policing manuals. 

In these, in-between moments, he had countless memories to call on in the quiet hours of the night. Memories he would scarcely believe were his own had they not been shared with Phryne. 

Together they had heralded in a new year to the chimes of Big Ben. They had flown over pyramids, chasing the shadow of their plane as it stretched and distorted to the topography of the landscape below. They had dined with royalty and given alms to the destitute. In France, they had laid the ghosts that they could to rest and those they couldn’t were burdens to be shared.

In the final days of their return journey, they walked an endless stretch of warm powdered sand on an island they were quite certain they were the first to set foot on. Though neither was of any religious denomination, they agreed to a likeness to Adam and Eve. And so, too, did they agree that in their hands the expulsion from Eden would likely have been a swifter one. Very little in regards to temptation was denied and in the nights –though not exclusively – they made love. In this Jack would venture that not many men would count being laughed at during lovemaking as memory they were keen to recall. It had started with a terrible joke of a provenance he could not remember, and a retaliatory quip about allowing time for both girth and mirth. It had struck them both as funnier than it ought to have been. A fit of giggles turned into a belly laugh until Phryne, so taken with laughter, had pushed him out of her body.

Jack smiled at the recollections and exchanging his whiskey from one hand to the other, he shouldered out of his braces. How was it that with all of this to draw on, these were not the pinnacle? 

No, this came not from the sweeping exultations of their travel – extravagant gestures were much easier with a backdrop of fulfilled wanderlust. It came in their return to earth. It was in the breaking of a self-enforced, albeit, short separation. To his mind it was a pristine, blissful thing that would not be tarnished in his recalling of it. He called on it often in these in-between times. Resting his head against the back of his chair, he closed his eyes and called on it now.

~*~

They had been returned home from London for three days. It had been agreed that a period of separation would be observed. The reasoning being that each would need to allow for the undertaking of the necessities neglected from their long absence. Neither voiced concern, but Jack was not invulnerable to doubt. 

In mind to retire for the evening, Jack heard a knock at the door. 

“Phryne!” 

Surprised to see her – she seldom knocked and even scarcer was it that she waited to be invited in.

She was dressed not for a night out as he would have expected at the hour, but for bed. Jack recognised the robe as one she had purchased in Persia. It was a beautiful midnight blue silk stitched with ivory thread that tattooed her back with peonies and jasmine. He did so love her in blue. 

Phryne, forgoing a conventional welcome, made an observation instead.

“Your smile is upside down! Did you know that?”

Stepping aside to allow her entrance, he hadn’t the opportunity to answer.

“Do it,” she demanded. “Smile.” 

Amused, Jack found that he was capable of doing little else but to indulge her.

She squinted her eyes and tipped her head sideways to better scrutinize him.

“Yes. Upside down!” Happy with the truth of her statement, Phryne took the whiskey glass from his fingers as she sauntered past him to the living room.

Closing the door blindly behind him, he followed her progress as she went. Jack wondered if she was entirely sober. Her appearance at his door suggested a decision both spontaneous and one of deliberation. A contradiction so like Phryne.

Phryne stood in front of his mantel piece. The embers from the dying fire framing her in a golden silhouette in the otherwise darkened room. 

“I need to ask you something,” She started. “Would you think me ridiculous if I tell you that I don’t want to see out the rest of the week as we agreed?” she held her chin high and seeing his confused face she clarified. “The not seeing each other part, that is.” 

The breath caught in Jack’s chest and burst instantaneously within it. In that moment he felt like he could cycle the circumference of the moon. Instead he felled his weight back into his armchair giving a little huff of spontaneous laughter on his landing. 

She walked slowly towards him. His eyes drawn to her as they so often were. Standing before him, the tips of her fingers brushed his hand as he held it splayed over the spine of a forgotten book as it lay open over the arm of the chair. 

“Do you mind that I’ve come?” Phryne said it in an almost whisper, as if in deference to the moment. It was a rhetorical question, he hoped.

His answer came in action, as he reached to grasp the fingers she traced along the tendons of his hand. A mutual assurance that this is what they both wanted. With their fingers entwined, he pulled her gently toward him, insinuating her to stand between his knees. With a lopsided grin, he tugged her further. 

Reading his tell, she freed her hand just in time to balance herself on his shoulders as she lowered herself to sit astride his hips as he had intended.

“I’m going to take that as a no,” She smiled down at him and adjusted herself for comfort on his lap. Aided by his hands on her hips, he drew her closer still.

“Do!” He said.

It was strange; he had missed her with every tick of the clock these last three days, and all the while being only mere minutes away from her front door. It had been easier to fulfil her request to follow her over thousands of miles than to maintain a close distance. But distance was measured in more than miles he reminded himself.

“I find that I’ve grown rather accustomed to sleeping beside you!” She spoke from her perch on his lap.

“Just beside me?” Jack called on humour to counter the lump in his throat. She made no response other than to raise her eyes to the ceiling in contrived thought.

Recalling her attention, he traced his thumbs over her hip bones and was rewarded with a sharp intake of breath and the bite of her fingernails to his shoulders. He leaned forward to nuzzle her neck only to be pushed gently back again. Puzzled he watched as she took his hands from her hips and held them gently clasped between the two of them. She took a deep breath.

“Me – sure that despite of time future, time past –,” She looked up from their linked hands and to his eyes and continued. “This tick of our life-time’s,” 

Jack recalled from the fog of his mind the familiar verse, grasping to summon its continuation. 

Phryne noted the exact moment his memory served him the answer, a smile so broad it was neither up nor down. 

“One moment you love me!” He finished for her.

She nodded her accord. “Now, as you were, Inspector.”

~*~

Jack stirred in his armchair disturbing the blanket he could not recall placing about himself. The crick in his neck was reason enough to wake further to carry himself off to bed finally for the remainder of the short hours before sunrise.

Bracing his weight on the arms of the chair he hauled himself up and propelled forward on sleepy legs. In the hallway he stopped in his tracks.

There was a shifting of the scented air. And a perfect cupid’s bow upon his forehead. 

**Author's Note:**

> Out of your whole life give but one moment!~  
> All of your life that has gone before,  
> All to come after it, – so you ignore,  
> So you make perfect the present, – condense,  
> In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment,  
> Thought and feeling and soul and sense 
> 
> – From Now by Robert Browning.


End file.
